Monday, October 14, 2013

Monday Math Literature Volume 14

New to my Monday Math Literature posts?  Click here to start at the beginning.

I am featuring some of the sweetest books in this installment of Monday Math Literature.  Quite a few years ago, I received a beautiful hard cover copy of Hershey's Weights And Measures Book from a student who was graduating and began my collection of chocolate and candy themed math books.  After all these years and MANY books later, the Weights and Measures Book is still one of my favorites.  Today I want to share this book and a few other favorites from this very sweet collection with you




This is such a cool book to use when talking about standard units of measure.  I will often bring it into a classroom to use a few pages with the whole group to discuss measuring distance or weight and we end up looking through the entire book.  I also love how accessible and engaging this story is and how many different ideas around measuring are packed into one book.  I have used this book in grades 1-6 sometimes just a few pages and sometimes in its entirety.  There are also some great random facts about Hershey in this book related to weights and measures.  Did you know they sell a 5 pound chocolate bar?  




I LOVE using this book with fourth and fifth graders.  It is best done when you can buy some Hershey's bars in bulk and have the students act out the book as you go along.  It covers some big ideas about equivalence and magnitude and even gets into fraction operations.  It is a super fun way to reinforce the big ideas of fractions with kids and since a Hershey bar is broken into 12 smaller pieces, it is the perfect way to reinforce other models of 12 such as egg cartons, rulers and clocks.

  

This is a great story to use with K-2 students and I often find myself using it on or around the 100th day of school.  It covers ideas around counting by 1's and 10's and 5's and 2's.  With second or third graders, I often get into writing multiplication and division equations based on how the M&Ms are grouped and even do some basic fraction work.  If you are going to use actual M&M's along with this book, go ahead and spring for one of the larger bags because you are going to need 20 of each color.  I am sure you can think of something to do with the ones that are left.

A final word on all of these books is that they seem to go in and out of print.  There have been times when I have been unable to purchase one or another over the years.  I find that even when they are out of print I can find a gently used on Amazon.

Do you have a favorite candy math book?

Want to check out more math literature books?  Click here to check out Volume 15!

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